Thousands of Bees Escape and Swarm Bed-Stuy

Several thousand bees escaped a station wagon on Madison Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Tuesday, drawing police who shut down the street and arrested the beekeeper, the Timesreports. Michael Hegedus was in his backyard teaching a beekeeping class when the bees in his Mercedes chewed their way out of their containers and fled out the open windows, swarming the vehicle. “He said he believed the cause of Tuesday’s episode was an equipment failure,” the paper reports. The “starter hives, which he bought in Brewster, N.Y., were constructed with cheap plastic materials instead of the sturdier, metal casings he was accustomed to using.”

The police called in their bee guy, Anthony Planakis, who “regularly responds to swarms and other apiary emergencies.” Within 90 minutes, 99 percent of the bees were sucked into a container known as a swarm box. Hegedus was given two summonses: one for disorderly conduct, another for violating an ordinance that states “a person who owns, possesses or controls a dog, cat or other animal shall not permit the animal to commit a nuisance on a sidewalk of any public place.” He was ok with that. “I’ll take the rap for the bees,” Hegedus said.